April 23, 2010

Corporates finally catch on to the potential of location based services

Sadly the companies that were pioneers in location based services and have since fallen by the wayside due to the intolerably long period of time it took for GPS and other location technologies to become pervasive, will not benefit from the tide that is now turning. The geo-caching nerds out there will be thinking to themselves that this Business Insider article is nothing new. Everything that Gowalla stands for (in terms of enabling technologies) has been around for nearly 10 years now, perhaps more but it’s only really become attractive to corporates in the past 12-months because of the sheer volume of gps enabled mobile handsets that have been sold in the past 3 years. I’m excited to see this boom and I’m grateful that it has finally come but can’t help feel sorry for the pioneers. Clearly this is proof that it doesn’t always pay to be first to market and that timing is indeed everything.